The Sport option was the reason my car had to come from 450 miles away. Sometimes it pays to do your research before and spend the extra money. If I could have found one with some 17's on it too, I would have gladly spend the extra few hundreds on it. Moral of the story: buy it factory installed and you have it from day one.

There wasn't one on the lot for me unless I wanted the DCT. My requirements were Manual transmission, SYNC, Sport Pkg and Moonroof. They only had to go 450 miles to find it. It's too bad more dealers don't go and look it up for more people. Singed papers on Sat, had my car on Thursday!

My requirements were 5spd and the sport package and it needed to be Candy red so the only option I didn't get was the winter package but not a dealbreaker for me. I test drove a Ti with the DCT at the urging of the sales man and wasn't impressed so I knew the 5speed was the right choice and my wife even demanded it.
Painting the calipers tomorrow.

There wasn't one on the lot for me unless I wanted the DCT. My requirements were Manual transmission, SYNC, Sport Pkg and Moonroof. They only had to go 450 miles to find it. It's too bad more dealers don't go and look it up for more people. Singed papers on Sat, had my car on Thursday!

I "accidentally" sold the car my Focus replaced 90 minutes after I listed it on Craigslist, so I kind of needed a car really, really fast. It's cool though, I'm quite happy with what I got. SYNC would be nice but in hindsight I just don't need it. Next car, I'm sure.

It's not the brakes that cause the front end to dive, it's the deceleration of the vehicle. Decelerating the car shifts its weight forward so there is a lot more weight over the front suspension in a hard stop.

I hate to bring this back up, but I tried something. If you pull the ebrake the rear of the car squats. What would make this any different than using the hydraulic rear brakes only?

I hate to bring this back up, but I tried something. If you pull the ebrake the rear of the car squats. What would make this any different than using the hydraulic rear brakes only?

Posted via FF Mobile

Good question. That's the torque from the rear brakes being trasmitted up through the suspension and frame. The parking brake doesn't exert enough torque to decelerate the car very rapidly, so the weight shift of the car is minimal and doesn't overcome the apparent effect of the brake torque on the suspension/frame.

Another way of putting it, if you were driving forward at 50 mph, and you made a panic stop with the pedal, those rear brakes will "pull" the rear of the car down slightly, but you've shifted so much weight off the back end of the car that the rear springs "push" the rear end up even more than the pull from the rear brakes, and the net effect is that the rear end will rise.

As proof, try driving backwards (slowly and carefully ) and then yank the parking brake. The rear of the car will actually lift up because the rear brake torque is in the opposite direction versus when driving forward.

And if you want to go crazy, build up some speed in reverse and stomp the pedal--the rear end will drop, as expected.

You could make the car nosedive driving forward with rear brakes if there were a way to activate only the rear hydraulics, ori if you had a ridiculously powerful parking brake.

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